Win Butler Apologises For Defacing Property With Arcade Fire’s Street Campaign
This is why we can't have nice things.
Arcade Fire’s cool mystery campaign for their forthcoming LP Reflektor was kinda cool, but not very mysterious.
Soon after the latticed-diamond chalk graffiti works began popping up in cities around the world – London, Berlin, New York, Sydney – some of the ‘artists’ involved admitted being hired by Arcade Fire. Or Arcade Fire just leaked it to someone. Nobody knows, it doesn’t really matter. So: not very mysterious.
But it was kinda cool. The DIY guerrilla style generated a heap more buzz than the TV or print marketing campaigns would have, all for the princely sum of a few boxes of chalk, and a couple of stencils.
The video(s) for ‘Reflektor’ landed earlier this week, the album of the same name has been confirmed for release November 1, the band got David Bowie on backing vocals and James Murphy twiddling the knobs behind the mixing board – it’s an indie kids wet dream, and everybody’s happy. Right?
Well, everyone besides the crybaby of the week, Ian Dille. Ian Dille’s wife works at a custom picture framing shop in Austin, Texas. Ian Dille is apparently no fan of Arcade Fire’s guerrilla campaign, writing a long and impassioned piece for Slate called ‘My Wife Was Vandalized By Arcade Fire‘, about how the most anticipated album of 2013 from the coolest band in the world has defaced the pristine white wall of that custom picture framing shop in Austin, Texas.
Apparently it detracted from the artistic NO PARKING sign spray painted on the wall, next to a black outline of a stork carrying a baby dropping bombs.
“It was round with crosshatched lines and some letters, but we couldn’t make out what they said,” Ian Dille wrote. “It was weird. Not as cool as the stork. But at least it wasn’t a tag, we decided.”
Ian Dille isn’t happy. Ian Dille says he and his wife were both Arcade Fire fans, having “listened to them since college, when they were a little indie act out of Canada, not the multimillion-dollar Grammy-winning band they are today.” Ian Dille feels “used” and “a little betrayed”.
While of course unsanctioned graffiti just isn’t on – I don’t want nobody tagging up my crib – Mr Dille needs to settle down. If your biggest complaint is that your wife’s work got caught up in a global guerrilla campaign from one of the biggest bands in the world, and said band left behind a slice of musical history on your wall, your life is going pretty well.
Yet band leader Win Butler was sorry enough for forcing Ian Dille to look upon a small painted emblem on a shop wall that he handwrote out a letter of apology.
“I’m really sorry that you and your wife had to put up with that,” Butler writes. “It is sometimes hard to control all those tiny details when you’re doing something on such a large scale.” As though Ian Dille had been through a traumatic incident or the loss of a loved one or the destruction of prized property.
Win Butler signs off with a lopsided “B”, and what looks like a “W” and “i” at the end of the letter.
In the end, we’ve all learnt two things. First: even the biggest band in the world is not immune to the wrath of custom picture framing store staff.
And second: Win Butler has pretty terrible handwriting.